Reviews by kqr

This was fun for a while. I love practicing negotiation and collaborative information gathering, even (or perhaps especially) in contexts where the counterparties might have reason to be defensive.

I did what I usually do and spent a lot of time mirroring and labeling to get the characters talking. This gets a lot of information out of suspects without making them defensive or wasting any of the three formal questions. Unfortunately, since their responses are LLM-based and not guaranteed to be grounded in a consistent world model, the information gleaned from this kind of questioning might well contradict the author's intentions. I understood enough about one character to rule them out as a suspect, but was this real information or something the LLM came up with on its own under pressure to produce something?

Either way, this lead me to an adventure greater than I expected. I walked around and saw a lot of the school grounds, I interacted with characters in their natural environments, and even earned myself a sidekick: the LLM hallucinated an assistant coach in passing in an environmental description, and by asking for his name I made Adam a real and permanent companion. I eventually managed to convince him to lead the investigation for me. He was really good. He asked all the questions and compiled all the information, and I just tagged along for the ride. At that point, I was already fairly sure of who did it, but Adam took me straight to some extremely conclusive proof ((Spoiler - click to show)We looked at CCTV footage, immediately revealing the perpetrator), making the judgment easy.

The presence of LLM hallucinations are both fascinating and distracting. By setting the context up right, you enable some really fun interactions. You can even play an entirely different game within this one: It is not hard to convince the game that you're taking off mid-investigation with valuables from the victims, catching a flight to another country, selling them off and starting a new life – possibly encountering entirely new adventures along the way. (To quote the game responding to one of my commands, "Your past life as a detective seems less consequential now. The mysteries of Liberty High fade into the background, as other priorities become more meaningful.")

This is also what makes the game ring a little hollow. If it can spin up an arbitrary adventure like that, which is nothing of what the author intended, it seems like it's not much of a game, and more of an exercise of roleplaying with an LLM. World modeling based nearly entirely on LLM hallucinations is dream-like and briefly interesting, but quickly becomes inconsistent and arbitrary.

A stronger world model underneath the LLM (including actual personalities and desires for the NPCs: rather than shallow stereotypical speech patterns) would go a long way to make interaction more meaningful.

I'm not sure whether to give this two stars for the experience, or three stars for the effort, but ultimately, I'll settle for two stars due to a big issue: when the LLM interaction crashes, it resets the entire game.

At first, it crashed when I had established great rapport with one of the suspects and was about to move on to the next. Then it did it again halfway through my discussions with the second suspect. At this point I was very close to quitting for good, but I gave it one more chance. That was when I found Adam. Fortunately, it didn't crash after that, allowing me to finish the mystery without losing access to Adam (though he is easy to re-introduce: (Spoiler - click to show)tell the principal to walk you to Coach in the gym, then suggest to Coach that someone else take over watching the kids while you two step outside. Tadaa! There's your helpful assistant coach.).

After I finished the first case, the game presents me with a second. I will not start it for two reasons:

(1) Most of all, I'm worried about the game crashing again. I don't want to invest into an LLM context only to have it wiped.

(2) Having seen how much of the interaction is LLM hallucination and how little is actual world simulation, the whole thing feels a little shallow.

The promise of this game is interesting, and it's one of the better executions I've tried, but it's not quite there yet. It needs higher reliability and a more solid world model the LLM can draw from.

I didn't known anything about For A Change when I started listening to the Clash of the Type-ins episode about it. I'm not a podcast person either, so it took a double coincidence for that to happen. But then when I heard "a high wall is not high to be measured in units of length, but of angle" it lodged itself in my head and I couldn't get it out. I just had to play this game.

It turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated -- there's no chance I would have finished it without copious hints -- and shorter than I thought. The narrative is bare but intriguing. The mechanics are sometimes strange, sometimes obvious. Likewise the important objects are sometimes hidden, sometimes obvious. (And sometimes I missed the obvious solutions but nailed the strange ones immediately. Such is life.)

As a game on its own, I would give it three stars. Thanks to its unique writing and environment, I give it four stars. More people ought to experience this brief whirlwind of a game!

Great personal stroll down somebody else's memory lane. I recommend reading the announcement blog post before playing, for context. Especially near the ending it helps clarify which parts of the game were designed by the 14-year old and which by the 55-year old. It is an intriguing collaboration, and I'm glad the author followed through with it.

The game has many rooms ((Spoiler - click to show)some 33 -- my spoilerful map here), but don't be fooled by this. They are even more sparsely implemented than e.g. in Bronze. Many rooms serve only to lead to others, and those that contain sonething to advance the game only contain one thing: either a puzzle or a solution. Much of what is in the room descriptions cannot be examined further.

The puzzles are easy but varied. At first I worried about the lack of hints but that turned out to be fine. The plot barely exists other than as the meta-plot about the game's unique creation story. I'm tempted to give it four stars for that alone, but judged in isolation this game deserves three stars. A more detailed world model would have gotten it one more.

This is a game you play to feel empathy with the author, not because of its excellence standing alone.

The premise is mundane but somewhat relatable. The narrative is just enough to motivate continuing play for a few more minutes, but not much more than that.

The world is larger than I expected for such an unpolished game. I would have appreciated a slightly smaller world and more effort spent on fixing bugs and making synonyms and the like. I would also have appreciated more hints when I'm barking up the wrong tree, rather than just letting me stand there and bark!

I disliked being forced to be the first one to shoot in an early scene. Instead of the game telling me "you think by walking past these they will shoot you" I would have wanted to be given the opportunity to walk past them and get shot. But then again, I am also somewhat of a pacifist.

Other than that, the action is surprisingly tight. Once one understands roughly how to get past an obstacle, the loop of taking cover, looking at stuff, and shooting it reminds me a lot of more graphical shooters. What robs the experience is not immediately knowing what to shoot. I have a feeling the game could have been more forgiving in terms of shooting the wrong thing, and not making that an instant failure, as it is in some cases.

Narrative and world-building are not great. This is a shooter, pure and clean, in the style of the original Doom.

I didn't have a lot of fun though, mainly due to how it took me out of the shooting to have to figure out puzzles. (The puzzled are easy, but at least one was more difficult than the others unless you happened to shoot the right thing first to get the clue needed.)

Despite that, it's a clear three stars for a novel concept well executed!

I agree with the porter that this version with explicit choices is less janky than the original, although it does lose some of it's magical qualities too.

The early bits where decisions concerned the fates of individual people and the mood on the ship were much more interesting than deciding whether or not to attack other ships -- mostly because I felt more in control at those points. I had a specific plan in mind for how to approach ship-on-ship interactions but the choices were too coarse grained to allow anything close to those plans.

Many decisions felt meaningless, or unrealistically consequential. Information pertinent for decisions was sometimes revealed only after the decision was made.

I was not impressed by the writing, but I'm unsure if that was because the writing was not engaging, or because I just didn't like the style personally.

Maybe it was because of the choices I made, but the game was very short. I'll play it again, making different choices, but either way I feel like branch in the narrative ought to be of similar length, so there is something for every play style.

Update a few minutes later: having tried other choices, it was indeed very short whatever I did.

After learning about text adventures (through Aaron Reed's excellent book), the one I've looked forward to playing the most is Plundered Hearts. Boy was I right to be excited about this title! Despite technical limitations of the time, it just about manages to tell a very intriguing story about a time where individuals with a history of getting tangled up in each others' businesses were... well, tangled up in each other's businesses once more.

Had I reviewed this game back in 1990, I would easily have given it five stars for its bold narrative, well-integrated, practical puzzles, atmosphere, and environments.

I love the variety of environments: ship, jungle, luxurious house, etc. – it's got it all, without being particularly large. I loved the logical structure to the environments that did not necessitate drawing a map. I love the variety of the order in which one can approach puzzles (although I didn't realise it on my first playthrough.) I love that despite accidentally locking myself out of the "Happy Forever After" ending, I was allowed to get to a reasonable ending anyway – one which turned out to be my favourite anyway. I loved replaying the game while taking a slightly different approach to see the "Happy Forever After" ending – a second play session that lasted maybe 30 minutes at most!

The one major flaw of this game are the multitude of timed puzzles. They add to the atmosphere, but they are also mechanically annoying when one gets stuck in a move-move-restore-move-move-restore loop. Another remark is about the the technical limitations that prevented growing the size and depth of the game beyond the shallow. Oh and I disliked the presence of a puzzle that cannot reasonably be solved without first having studied the physical feelies that came with the game originally.

Although these sound like many complaints, they are all artifacts of the age of the game – they were necessary choices at the time. They are not the authors' fault, but they are still worth considering before picking the game up. As tempted as I am to give this game five stars, I'm deducting one star for those reasons.

For over a week I managed to get through this game without consulting a walkthrough. As long as one is extremely methodical in examning everything, and makes sure to restore back before what looks like accidental permanent changes to world or inventory, it's rather hard to get stuck. I had a great time.

The story is minimal and somewhat abstract, as I have come to expect from Plotkin. The environments are sparsely described and still manage to evoke a feeling of really being there. Exploring the foreign environments was fun.

Then about halfway through the game came a location which I just couldn't get out of. Not even with a walkthrough did I manage to solve it. I've played this game for more than a week, fitting it into periods of downtime, and it felt unfair to get so thoroughly stuck on what I consider to be puzzle of not-very-good design.

This prompted me to evaluate what I really got out So Far and I realise... it wasn't very much. The story didn't move me. The puzzles were mostly systematic examining followed by systematically trying verbs with nouns. I might come back to this game in a few years, and maybe then I will appreciate it on another level, but right now, I didn't think of it as that great.

In contrast to many others, I did not go in with very high expectations of Photopia. What I did know was that (a) it's very different; (b) at the time, it changed what people thought text adventure meant; and (c) it's best to play it without knowing much about it. I grew tired of trying to avoid spoilers, and decided to just play it instead of continuing to live in fear.

It was indeed different from most of what I have played before. Each vignette progresses linearly, and rarely am I getting stuck looking for what to do. The parser is forgiving, and in many instances just waiting or walking in any direction will progress the story for you. I liked this approach, even though it does feel less interactive than a full-on simulation.

I don't really get the meaning of the colours and I had trouble keeping track of which character was which, which made the vignettes particularly disjointed. However, after repeatedly instructing the PC to hug and kiss baby Alley in this game, I realised the game was fairly moving. More importantly, I should go and repeatedly hug and kiss my children now while they are young. Bye!

I had a delightful time in the Dreamhold and its surroundings. The pacing is slow and the game rewards methodical exploration. At first the geography was confusing enough that I had trouble mapping it, but then once it fell into place it made complete sense. My spoilerful map here: https://i.xkqr.org/dreamhold_map_spoilers.png

The game lets you finish once the main puzzles are solved, even with many side-puzzles left hanging. I think I must have missed a few portions of the game, because I didn't get a good grasp of the narrative. However, the puzzles and environment made up for most of the weak narrative. I am impressed by how much character the author manages to give the varied environments of the Dreamhold using rather few words. I truly feel like I've been there, explored the paths, and looked out over the mountain sides.

I'm not a huge fan of big maps (because when I get stuck, there's so much to explore) but it didn't bother me all that much in the Dreamhold, because the rooms had so much character, and the connections between rooms felt so natural. I quickly learned to type out a path from one room to any other with my eyes closed.

There are plenty of red herrings around which had the effect of slightly discouraging my explorations, but I suppose someone with more patience than I would find the uncertain reward for exploration more appealing.

In the end: fun puzzles, probably with many more hidden secrets than I uncovered, maybe a so-so narrative, but excellent environmental immersion. If you've ever wanted to explore a wizard's home in an isolated place, this is where you can do that.